Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/World of Warcraft/Archive 1

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[edit] World of Warcraft

A thorough and well written article on a very popular game. I believe it fufills all the requirements of a featured article. No major problems as far as I can tell, but then again I've never nominated an article before so I may be wrong. RyGuy17 18:52, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

• Object. Contains a number of one-sentence paragraphs, and has many section without inline references. Some sections are not written in an encyclopedic tone. Should be sent to Peer review, and then re-nominated. RyanGerbil10 (Drop on in!) 18:59, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
• Object this articles has some issues that needs to be fixed

1. images need fair use rationale
2. Very little on criticism of the game
3. Several sections, especially the Major world events part reads very uncyclopedic
4. Needs much more refs, and several of the refs come from the World of Warcraft Community Site page, which is not an valid source
5. Many one sentence paragraphs

Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 00:30, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

• Support. It is long enough and well written Deananoby2 04:20, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
• Object Please fix the following:

1. Subjective statement in lead: "Featuring a low learning curve, easy level advancement,"
2. Unsourced weasel words in lead: "The game is widely regarded as a success"
3. The first paragraphy of the body does not need to include detailed contents of the collector's box (e.g. "A cloth map of Azeroth.")
4. Cite sources for statistics like "The game sold more than 240,000 copies in its first 24 hours on the market, more than any other PC game in history" and "As of March 2006, World of Warcraft has more than 6,000,000 players worldwide."
5. Avoid unencylopedic tone as in statements like "As is common with the launch of an MMORPG, World of Warcraft had its share of problems at first," and "And, as with any game, it has its own language or terminology." Starting a sentence with a conjunction is not ideal either.
6. Statements like"Due to World of Warcrafts high sales it has been described as a "runaway success" with "overwhelming popularity"", even if footnoted, should tell us who is saying these things in the body of the text.

That should be enough for a little while. MarkBuckles 07:57, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

• Object: Good information present, but its presentation is lacking in many ways:

1. The tone is simply not conducive to an encyclopedic presentation throughout
2. Critical analysis is a bit lacking (I realize that there's a daughter article specifically for that, but it's an important aspect of an article, so you should include more of it)
3. Far too few references, especially where important sales figures are concerned
4. Don't bold things like "Blizzard also stated that at any given time at least 500,000 subscribers are online". The objective is to provide readers information about the subject, not to suggest to them some parts are more important than others with things that the eye can't help but be drawn to. Usually only the primary term in an article requires bolding
5. The lead-in to the Major world events section is good, but I'm not so sure that going into that much detail on every one of them is. Perhaps a daughter article could be made on the subject and then you could just provide a brief overview of them here if you felt it necessary to offer some details on them (but do it in a single paragraph, if possible). I just think this section is going a bit far beyond what an uninitiated reader would be interested in, and would, in fact, be a little daunting to them. I do applaud the way the sections above transition the reader into the terms being used (such as "professions" and "realms"), but the inclusion of all this detail is a bit sudden and probably would leave most people feeling a bit out of their element
6. Images definitely need to be summarized better and need some fair-use rationale. For some examples of an effective way to include that, see Final Fantasy X's images
7. Do we have any development info? Information from the creators on how they got the idea, how they went about implementing it, why they chose to do things a certain way? The closest the article comes to really offering any is in the Deviation from the MMORPG archetype and Major world events sections. As far as it goes, the latter only presents the impression — but not the declaration with reference — that fans who felt Warcraft was too static prompted Blizzard to try giving it a more dynamic angle. Development info is really valuable, so if you can get some of that, it would be great
8. Overall, try to remember that the target audience for an article like this is the people who are entirely unfamiliar with Warcraft

I think that you should try to address all of these issues we've brought up here, then take it to Peer Review to iron out any other major-to-minor issues that might be present, and then give it another shot at FA. You've got some good information here in a lot of places, but a lot of it's not presented properly, not properly sourced or just doesn't consider the uninitiated reader as well as it should. Good luck with the future of the article. Ryu Kaze 12:50, 27 July 2006 (UTC)